album reviews: jay chou and hins cheung

i had wanted to make this post in chinese too, since the albums are mandarin/cantonese. but, the thing is, it takes too long to input chinese characters. if only i have the tabloid programme especially to recognise chinese characters written on it. i used to own and use it way back in primary school.

please note that this short review is solely based on the music, not the lyrics.

anyway. i personally don't like jay chou's new album, capricorn, overall.

no, the album isn't epic, contrary to what the cover suggests.

apart from the few featured songs like 稻香 (fragrant paddy) and the pretty good ballad 说好的幸福呢 (loosely translated to: where's the promised happiness), the rest of the songs feature a rockin' jay messing around with traditional western sounds such as yodelling and cowboy-style banjo-like riffs and chords in 魔术先生 (mr. magician) and snazzy harmonica played ad libitum in 流浪诗人 (wandering poet). or traditional oriental sounds with the erhu in 花海 (flower sea) and 兰亭序 (orchid pavillion). the rest are pretty much in the usual urban RnB style.

i only like 稻香 and 说好的幸福呢. the rest just don't feel significant enough to have a place in my already-full mp3 player. like what the general comments about the album say, this album's contributions to the large repertoire of mandopop is just tiny. it's all the same!

not that same is bad. bach wrote a four-part chorale per week for his church's mass for a period of time, and the total number of bach's works number over a thousand. chopin composed quite a lot of piano music (i forgot how many). and some of their stuff, especially bach's, sound the same!!! for example, i notice bach likes to use the motif from the invention in b-flat major in any keyboard music that is in the same key.

but! jay chou isn't dominating the music scene, unlike how bach is one of the dominant forces of baroque music today (he's dead, by the way). we listeners have so many artistes to choose from, you know. and i'm neither a big fan or hater of jay chou (ok, i used to be a little bit his fan a while back - liked his ballads from the older albums).

jay chou's rivals are catching up with him. i say, if weren't for the fact he introduced the then-new style, which was entirely his back then, to mandopop back in 2000, this album would sell just as well as the average artiste's. hey, everyone's singing in the rnb style. and we've got oriental and hip-hop and whathaveyou genres infused into pop. the instrumentations, the tunes, the accompaniments are all so similar.

actually, you can similarly argue that hin cheung's urban emotions is the same old thing again.



yea, actually that's quite true. but i'm very biased towards good vocals, and hins cheung is a singer with pretty good vocal technique. go search for videos of him sounding like pavarotti, or when he uses falsetto and whistle tone to exciting effect. too bad little of it is found in this album. i always like artistes who stretch their vocals to good effect. like christina aguilera, justin 侧田and jj lin.

if you see rnb as the in thing, then cantopop must be a little vintage. but everyone likes sappy ballads with soaring vocals once in a while.

oh, and the album features rihanna in her duet hate that i love you, where hins sing in two versions (cantonese and mandarin). actually i quite like rihanna's voice. just that mass-producing catchy singles gives the impression she's substance-less.